


Veni, Vidi, Vida

by vatreniworld



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: A request from my blog, Crack, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Prank Wars, it's still one of my favorites
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 13:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17407757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vatreniworld/pseuds/vatreniworld
Summary: Try as they might, no one on the national team was safe from Domo's antics.





	Veni, Vidi, Vida

**Author's Note:**

> Musical Inspiration: "SEAGULLS! (Stop It Now)" by Bad Lip Reading
> 
> Crossposted from my blog.

“It’s quiet. Too quiet…”

“What’s too quiet, Uncle Mandžo?” Ema Modrić asked from next to him.

“Everything, kid,” he said, gesturing to the gym.

Ema obediently scanned the room, analyzing every little detail of activity. She frowned, a small pout puckering on her lower lip. “What’s wrong with it?” she demanded.

Mario knelt down, throwing an arm around Ema’s tiny frame. “Look a little harder. What do you see happening? What’s missing?”

Ema shoved her hands in her pockets and said simply, “Uncle Domo.”

“Bingo,” he nodded and offered a fist bump. Ema sheepishly returned the bump. “Now,” he stood back up, “better get going before all hell breaks loose here.”

“Mario!” Luka hollered from the gym doors. “What are you telling her?!”

“Domo’s missing!”

Luka pinched the bridge of his nose. “Great…,” he groaned. “Who knows what he’s got planned this time.”

“We’ll find out sooner or later,” Mario said, a sense of foreboding settling over the room.

For the following two weeks, the entire team was on edge. Thankfully, they all managed to keep it together throughout practice. They turned into paranoid messes the moment that practice ended, though.

Domo strolled down the hallway as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He whistled the "Marica" tune as he turned the corner to hit the showers. Before he disappeared, though, he made sure to send the rest of the team a sneaky wink.

“Marica has never sounded so malicious,” Šime said, forlorn.

“The bastard’s enjoying this,” Mario chimed in.

Dejan sighed, “I’m almost tempted to ask him to just get it over with and put us out of our miseries.”

Silence settled over the crowd in the hall.

“We’re gonna regret this, aren’t we?” Luka asked rhetorically.

* * *

After practice, Luka was eager to get in a warm shower. Some days his body felt like a clock slowing down; others, a locomotive. Today just happened to be one of those “clock” days. He switched on the shower and waited for the water to warm up. While it was nice to get the grit and grime off him after a long day, he liked showers most to help ease any residual pain he had in his knees.

Once the water reached a suitable temperature, he climbed into the stall, sighing at the immediate relief the water provided. Leaving his face in the water, Luka blindly fumbled for his bottle of shampoo. It was nothing special, but it did the job.

A loud crash came from two stalls over followed by a sharp  _bang_. “DOMO!” Mario’s voice echoed off the tiled floor and low ceiling.

Luka winced. So it began. He’d have to check it out once he finished his shower.

He squeezed a dollop of shampoo onto his head and began massaging it into his scalp. The texture felt…strange. Luka opened his eyes and checked the excess shampoo on his hands. To his horror, it was nothing remotely close to shampoo. Instead, it was brown and thick and undeniably sticky.

Luka sniffed his hand. It was peanut butter.

He tried to rinse it out for five minutes before finally giving up and accepting that he looked like a doofus. He needed to find Ema and take her home. Maybe Vanja could help him get the rest of the peanut butter out.

He walked outside to the pitch to find Mario - in his full Honey Dust glory - charging after Domo with righteous fury.

“YOUR GIRLFRIEND WILL THANK ME FOR IT!” Domo hollered as he cackled from one end of the pitch to the other.

Domo caught sight of Luka from the corner of his eye and bellowed, “RUN, EMA!” a mad grin peeling across his face despite Mario chasing after him like a lion with an antelope (with matching growls to boot).

Luka did a double take while still trying to rub the peanut butter out of his hair. “EMA?!” he cawed and swiveled around to get a sight of her. In his haste, his hair splattered across his eyes in a sticky mess. With a grimace, Luka gingerly peeled back his bangs, futilely trying to ignore the  _squish squash_  of his scalp as the peanut butter slid down the back of his neck and under the collar of his shirt.

Just as told, Ema continued to run full-tilt across the pitch to the main building.

“DOMO, GET BACK HERE! I’M GONNA KILL YOU!” Mario roared, slipping in the grass for a third time as Domo headed for heaven-knows-where.

Šime emerged from the main building a sniffling, blubbering wreck, holding what looked to Luka like a box of domaćica. “Domo!” he cried, “Have you no shame?! SWEETS ARE SACRED, DOMO!” He fell to his knees, dropping the box in the process. Out rolled what to the average person looked like a normal domaćica.

Luka picked a domaćica out of the grass and tentatively bit off the tip.

“Luka-!” Šime tried to intervene.

Too late.

If Luka’s tongue, nose, and throat had actually been on fire, he might have felt better than he did at that instant. “What the hell is that?!” he crowed over the pain building its way up his sinuses and bolted for the water cooler on the other side of the pitch. He slid under the tap and turned it on full guzzle.

“Leave some for me!” Šime yelled frantically, scrambling to his feet.

Luka rolled out of Šime’s way, gasping against the sting on his tongue. “What’s…in those…things?”

Šime shoved a small piece of paper at Luka while he tried to tip as much water out of the cooler as possible.

Luka unfolded the crumpled sheet and groaned in pain as he read the short message in Domo’s unmistakable scratchy penmanship.

“ _Be careful. These domaćice pack a ghostly (pepper) punch! ;)_ ”

Of course Domo would write out an emoticon.

“Ghost peppers?!” Luka screeched. Between the damage his hair and mouth had taken, Luka wondered if he would be better off just crawling under the bleachers and sleeping there for the night.

“Uh-huh,” Šime gargled around the dregs of the water. He gasped in relief and tossed the cooler off to the side. He lay spread eagled in the grass in a daze for less than a minute before something occurred to him. “Where’s Dejan?”

A horrified screech pierced the dusk.

Luka and Šime met each other’s eyes. “Showers,” they said in unison, knowing where this was heading given how they turned out.

Meanwhile, Mario was threatening to destroy the goal after he lost track of Domo a couple minutes ago and muttering (more like raving, but they wouldn’t tell him that) expletives.

“Mario!” Luka yelled. Mario halted his efforts of climbing the goal like King Kong. “We gotta get Dejan.”

Mario hopped off the goal and followed Šime and Luka to the showers at a brisk jog.

Once they arrived, they staggered to a halt at the door at the sight before them. Dejan stood at the sink, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He clutched the edges of the sink so hard they threatened to crack.

“Dejan,” Šime prodded uneasily, “are you okay?”

Silently, Dejan turned around, giving them a full view of his now fuschia hair.  He fixed the three of them with an unamused glare. “Don’t say a word,” he ordered.

Mario could barely choke back his laughter, “He dyed your hair pink?!”

“Look who’s talking!” Dejan shot back. “You look like you belong on a stripper pole sparkling like that!” Mario barked gruffly. Dejan’s eyes slid over to Luka, whose peanut buttered hair had hardened from a chocolate brown to something resembling a cow patty. “What happened to you?”

“Don’t ask,” Luka sighed and resisted the urge to run a hand through his hair.

“Šime,” Dejan accused, “why do you look normal?”

“He defiled the sanctity of domaćice!”

Dejan frowned. “I don’t know what that means, but Domo obviously got to you, too.”

A beat later, Ante and Suba stumbled into the showers. A thick film of yellow paint and feathers covered Ante from head to toe. The only way to really tell it was him were his eyes standing out against the expanse of yellow. Suba literally had pie to the face.

“I  _hate_  pie,” Suba groused.

Ante didn’t say anything, blinking owlishly at the lot of them.

“What I don’t get,” Šime said distantly, scratching the back of his neck, “is how he managed to pull  _this many_  off. He’s gotten all of us before, but not with individual pranks.”

Luka remembered what Domo yelled on the pitch. “Ema,” he said plainly. “Betrayed by my own daughter,” he despaired.

“Better watch out for that one in the future,” Mario hissed.

Luka groaned, “Vanja’s gonna have a cow.”

The building-wide speaker system crackled to indicated it turned on. “Attention! May I have your attention, please?” Domo’s smug voice came through overhead. “If you all are done chasing after me, Ema and I have an announcement to make back on the pitch.” With that, the speakers sputtered off.

“Well,” Suba shrugged, “what do we have to lose?”

“Our dignity,” Dejan said.

“I think we’ve lost more than just our dignity today,” Šime added.

Out on the pitch, Domo waited with Ema in tow. “Good to see you all survived!” he grinned and beckoned the team closer. He turned his attention down to Ema, “Ema, if you’d do the honors.”

Ema produced a stack of papers from inside her jacket and read off the top one, “Congratulations on graduating from Prank Day 2018. You are now ready to face Prank Day 2019. Good luck.” She then got started handing out certificates with the players’ names and what prank they survived. After she finished her task, Ema shuffled silently next to Luka and said evenly, “I’m ready to go home now.”

“That’s that, then!” Domo beamed, slowly backing away from the crowd. “Until next time, guys!”

“Oh no, you don’t!” Mario bayed. “Get him!”

Thus, the circus started up again.

Luka glanced down at Ema and lightly pushed her towards the car. “Let’s go, Ema…”

“Did you have fun today, papa?” Ema asked sheepishly.

“Fun?” Luka echoed. Fun wouldn’t have been his first choice of word.

Ema nodded. “Uncle Domo said everyone needed a break from being serious. He said he wanted everyone to have fun.”

Thinking it over, Luka supposed that sounded like Domo. And, if he were being completely honest, he hadn’t felt that much like a kid since the last time Domo pulled a prank.

“Yeah, sweetie. Today was fun,” he said softly, kissing the crown of her head. “But, you’re still gonna get this peanut butter out of my hair or I’m telling mama.”

“Deal.”


End file.
